Maggie's Farm

In contrast w Bodie, I very much liked New Math, especially writing all those proofs, which we did from 9th grade on. Before New Math, math was boring for me. New Math made math fun for me- mainly because of the proofs. It was empowering to write proofs. But judging from my high school classmates, New Math was not a good fit for most of them. I still remember our Junior Class President writing in my yearbook, "No more math misery."

A family friend who was a Phi Beta Kappa math graduate from a Big Ten school was my 9th grade math teacher. With all her intellectual bonafides, she was not a good teacher. I taught myself the course from the textbook- and a good textbook it must have been for me to do so. In spite of having a bad math teacher, I liked math more at the end of the year than at the beginning of the year, thanks to the textbook,

Ed Schools have been messing up education for a hundred years. Apparently Kilpatrick was at the forefront. Those who become good teachers generally do so in spite of what they learned in their respective Ed Schools. Instead of trying to invent the next big theory which will explain everything, Ed Schools should concentrate on the nuts and bolts of education: what has worked and not worked in 2500 years of formal classroom instruction.

When I talked to her teacher, she explained that they wanted to teach how math worked but not the rote memorization stuff!

Estimation is a very important real-life math skill. Estimation is a skill that comes up all the time. I serve on the Board of my HOA. In a recent meeting, we needed a figure for how much a special assessment would cost for given units of various sizes. I came up with an estimation for what the special assessment would be for various unit sizes, a.k.a. ballpark figure, for the Board. No, I didn't have an EXACT figure for 2.053% , but 2% did just fine.

If you don't know your "rote memorization," you will be unable to estimate. Period.

The reason I am good at estimating is my combination of "rote memorization" and New Math skills. From the various proofs I did in 9th grade of the various distributive, communicative, and associative principles for division and multiplication, I figured out for myself that 19X41=(20-1)X(40+1) which can be estimated to be 20X40.

I had a math professor in college who had met Max Beberman the creator of UICSM, the New Math program I had in high school. My professor informed me that New Math Max Beberman told him that the intent in his UICSM New Math had NEVER been to ignore learning the "rote" multiplication and division skills. NEVER.

One problem with New Math/ UICSM was that it was being taught, especially in elementary school, by teachers whose understanding of math was not good. Those who designed the various New Math programs should have taken that into account.

This is a REAL problem! How do you get kids interested in science, math, engineering, etc., if working the math is so painful?
With a calculator, you can get the answer for a calculation a lot faster than by hand. However, if you are careless, you can be way off. The best way to prevent this is to do an estimation before you set up, with exponents and numbers. Again, estimation skills are very helpful, which comes down to "rote" skills.